Dear America,
Washington demagogues are enamored of acronyms and portmanteaus in that they tersely decry the opposition and concisely identify them as populist heroes. I have a new one for them: Trumpicide. It has three meanings, depending on who is committing it. Let me start with Trump himself.
All of the suspicion of his team, both before and since his election, is a function of the actions of Trump himself. He publicly asked the Russians to produce the purported 30,000 emails missing from the server that Hillary Clinton gave up to investigators when the Republicans latched onto what they perceived as a lethal blow to her campaign. Eventually, after several contra tempts of that kind, he fired the director of the FBI and then admitted that his motivation was to punish the former director, James Comey, for declining to quash the investigation of the possible connection between Russian meddlers in the American election of 2016 and members of Trump's campaign organization and subsequently his advisory personnel. Then it came out that his son, Donald, Jr., who is not a member of the White House staff, had a meeting during the election campaign with a former Russian spy and several other Russian operatives, initially claiming that the meeting was about adoption of Russian children by Americans, which turned out not to be the truth. The meeting was actually about purported damaging information about Clinton, and his own emails demonstrate his enthusiasm for acquiring it. And now that all this has come out, along with allegations about Trump campaign leaders, like Paul Manaforte for example, it appears that there were at least three Trump acolytes, including Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump says that his son is a "good boy" as if none of this is even questionable. Add the healthcare controversy in which Trump admits that he is rooting for the collapse of another Washington portmanteau, "Obamacare" as it has been dubbed by the Republicans, or in the alternative repeal of the law, which will leave over 30 million people uninsured if the Republicans can manage to commit the act. Trump trumpicide: meaning 1.
Then there is what the Republicans are doing in connection with Obamacare. They are being steered by Trump to do to the American people, even many Trump voters, something that no one on Medicaid is going to thank them for: restrict eligibility for the expanded Medicaid that Obamacare made available, but that only Democratic states and a few Republican ones decided to avail themselves of. True, even a few Republicans are flouting Mitch McConnell's attempts to make them jump on the sword that he and other party leaders have been wielding as if they believed their own propaganda, but they keep banging away at the effort, thus reinforcing the argument that the Republicans are not the common man's friends. They continue to indulge in casuistry like the claim that the Democrats are obstructing their effort to legislate even though the Republicans have majorities in both houses, enough members of which they cannot convince that what McConnell wants to do is a good idea. They claim that the Democrats enacted Obamacare unilaterally even though everyone saw at least one two party conference on the law that was on television for all to see. And there were dozens of hearings in congress itself, though it is true that no Republicans voted for the law...an example of Republican obstructionism that was echoed over and over again during the period of Democratic legislative hegemony. Republican trumpicide: meaning 2.
And then there is what the Republicans and Donald Trump are doing to the very people who elected them: denying them healthcare that some of them have never had access to in their lives. The Republicans are actually trying to kill some of their very own voters, and even if the actual deceased aren't very many in number, their families and friends vote too. So, when the Republicans go to those very people for support in 2018, and when Trump does so in 2020...well, what are the odds. Trumpicide against the beneficiaries of Obamacare: meaning 3.
The Republicans are courting disaster, to use one of Donald Trump's favorite words, and they are doing it literally in Trump's own name.
Your friend,
Mike
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